Friday, May 29, 2009

The rest is silence

Think you know silence? Come prove it at The Silence Project!

The Silence Project

I was listening to a Sierra Club podcast today on a very noisy bus about One Square Inch of Silence. It is about a man's quest to preserve non-manmade noise from one square inch of the Olympic National Park in Washington state (U.S.A.) The podcast made me consider how noisy the world is. The mission, therefore, of this blog, is to present audio files of what we think is silence. Perhaps we may find some. Perhaps it is impossible. I don't know.

If you want to join, email me at gardnecl@gmail.com. Put "The Silence Project" in the subject line of your email. You'll have to have a blogger.com account.

The rules are simple: record less than 20 seconds of what you think is silence, post it to whatever file service you choose (I suggest the Internet Archive), and sit back and enjoy the silence.

In any case, here is my first prototype for The Silence Project:


Tuesday, May 26, 2009

The Magic is Lost

Remember the magic of getting a new Yellow Pages? I recall as a kid when this device of great potential would show up on our door step. Nearly as good as a new J.C. Penney catalog for fantasizing about exotic (but of course very mundane things), the new Yellow Pages offered insight into the stores and services in exotic parts of Salt Lake City that our family never or rarely ventured to. After perusing the book for hours, I would ask my mother if we could visit a certain toy store, for example, usually to be shot down with "there's no reason to drive all the way over there!" We'd then end up at K-Mart, and as everyone knows there is precious-little magic in K-Mart (aside from the blue light, that is.)

There was only one time when my cajoling my mother to go to a toy store found in the Yellow Pages actually worked, and that was for a store that used to be in Salt Lake's Trolley Square. I'm not sure why my mother agreed to go--perhaps she just wanted to get off the farm for an afternoon. In any case, the toy store lived up to my expectations--all sorts of exotic toys and games. I believe I bought a wooden yo yo, but it may have been something else.

The magic of Yellow Pages now Yellow Book, is long gone, however, and one must wonder why it even exists with the ubiquity of the Internet. When Yellow Book arrived last week on my door step I was just annoyed as I tripped over it. It went right into the recycling bin.

Tuesday, May 12, 2009

Ineffable


Ineffable
Originally uploaded by Theorris

It seems to be about circles lately.